


A Delicate Cage

by leonidaslion



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-22
Updated: 2011-06-22
Packaged: 2017-10-20 15:29:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/214232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leonidaslion/pseuds/leonidaslion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik has never been one to shy away from baiting the bear...</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Delicate Cage

**Author's Note:**

> Because [dreamlittleyo](http://dreamlittleyo.livejournal.com/) is a HORRIBLE ENABLER.
> 
> Fill for prompt 09 on the icon prompt table below.

“What are you thinking?” Charles is apt to ask when they’re alone, nothing but a bottle of bourbon on the table between them to keep them company.

“Can’t you guess?” Erik answers, with the slight tilt of his lips that he knows Charles finds so fascinating. There’s no need for telepathy there, not when it comes to innocent, sweet Charles, who wears his own thoughts on his face. Erik can never decide whether he’s truly that naïve or if he does it in some gauche attempt to level the playing field.

“I wouldn’t know how.”

No, of course he wouldn’t. Charles Francis Xavier, the man who has it all, who has always had everything he has wished offered to him without hesitation, who deals only in certainties and facts, because the world is a transparent veil before him. All secrets on display like burlesque girls in a tawdry whorehouse.

Erik leans forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, and steeples his fingers over his mouth. Challenge in his eyes—or perhaps invitation; he can feel that small boy who screamed for his parents in the mud stirring from the shallow grave the Nazis dug. It was Erik’s hand on the shovel when the dirt piled in—quickly, schnell, schnell, pay no mind to the screaming, pay no mind to the faint trembling of the limbs as the boy, as little Erik Lehnsherr stirs with the patter of earth raining down—but it’s still their grave, and it takes Nazi blood to silence it, to send the revenant inside back to peaceful, sated slumber.

It’s Charles, that snake-handler, that voodoo priest, that messiah aching for a martyr’s cross, who stands over the mounded earth and summons back things that should not see the light of day. There’s no iron to that pathetic, pale corpse. He’s of no use to Erik; no use to Charles’ dream of peace. He was of no use to his mother.

Illogically—damnably—the soft, fond brush of Charles’ hand when he leans across the table to touch Erik’s arm almost makes Erik miss him anyway.

“I wish you’d just talk to me, Erik,” Charles says. His eyes are darker than normal—the bourbon. His face is flushed with the things they have done behind closed doors, clothing and pretenses scattered about the floor like withered, torn cocoon-leavings.

Obvious.

Oblivious.

Erik thinks, not for the first time, that perhaps what Charles needs is for someone to put him into a box for safekeeping. Perhaps he needs to be… secured. Before some careless human breaks him.

“I wish you’d stop talking about talking,” Erik counters without moving his fingers from his mouth.

“You have an alternate subject to suggest?” Charles asks. There’s still too much levity to him, no matter that his thumb rests lightly over Erik’s pulse.

He isn’t wearing any jewelry. Erik wonders if that was deliberate choice or accident.

“You tell me.”

Charles’ brow furrows. He takes his hand back and leaves an absence of heat behind: a chill.

It was always cold in the camps.

“No. Not when we’re alone.”

Alone like this, he means. When they’re alone and not training.

“Why not? It isn’t an invasion. I’m inviting you.” Erik sits back finally, spreading his arms wide. “Come on in, Charles. Read my mind.”

But Charles darts his eyes to the side and takes a deep swallow of his bourbon. Now Erik feels warm—there’s something boiling beneath his skin, something dark and corrugated and bound with barbed wire.

Charles is trying to play the human with him.

He stands abruptly, jaw clenched, and turns to go. And stops at the hand on his arm, Charles standing near.

“Wait. Erik.”

The heat boils up through him—the same, twisting surge that Erik feels when he grasps the power soldered to his bones—and he lets it drive him around. He grips Charles’ wrist hard enough to draw a gasp from him. He forces their mouths together, and Charles’ lips taste like bourbon, and they’re softer than he thought they might be, all the times he considered doing this and didn’t quite dare.

So damned funny, all the things Charles has let Erik do to him and he hasn’t even once asked for this. He hasn’t hinted at wanting it beyond a vague, fey fascination with Erik’s lips when they twist just so.

Erik means the kiss to burn. He means to funnel all the fire into the maddening man before him until there’s nothing left but charred ash, like the ash in the kiln where they put his mother. Charles lifts a hand—the hand Erik isn’t crushing—and cups Erik’s cheek. And the kiss trembles on the verge of something, some great, shifting beast that could be… together, what they could be…

The boy in the grave opens his mouth to scream. Dirt tumbles in.

Erik twists his face away and is breath is coming too quickly. His cheeks are damp and there’s a terrible confusion in his head.

 _What are you doing to me?_ he thinks. _Goddamn you, Charles, what are you doing?_

But what he says is, “What are you so afraid to see?”

“I don’t,” Charles starts and then falters. His hand is still on Erik’s face, thumb shifting almost hypnotically through the saltwater tracks cutting vertically down his cheekbones. A moment later, he clears his throat and finishes, “I don’t know what this is for you, and I’m afraid of—I don’t want to be in this alone.”

“And you’d see if you were,” Erik says, tracking that line of reasoning to its root. Terror thrills beneath his skin—this is the crux of it; this is what Erik has to know, what he has to see. Before the screaming, restless dead boy bursts from the soil to drag him down in its place. “Because you see everything. Every thought. Every secret.”

“Yes,” Charles breathes.

Erik forces himself to turn back, to meet Charles’ eyes despite the confusion and the child sobbing in the dirt beneath his chest. “A man who is ruled by fear is not a man at all.”

It stings. He can see that it stings because Charles’ expressive, beautiful face crumples inward. But he only has a moment to regret that necessary pain before the world is awash with images. With nightmares. Frayed pieces of the past that swirl up obediently to Charles’ call.

It was like this on the veranda before. Like and yet not, because Charles was holding back then, Erik knew he was, and this… this is immersion. Integration.

And once again, despite the dread of revelation that fills him, he sees… God, what sort of shining, merciful beast they could become. Metal and mind. Steel and heart. Darkness burned to light.

And then Erik is released ( _God, God, did he know Charles could do that? That he could go so deep?_ ) and Charles is laughing shakily. He’s crying too, tears to match those on Erik’s face ( _no shame in crying, no shame in the tears if everyone who saw him weep and laughed is dead, save one, save the mother-killer, and Erik has something for him, he does_ ).

He didn’t see the coin.

There’s not more than a moment of thought between reading Charles’ oblivious reassurance and the smile that broadens Erik’s lips. He’s had too many long, careful hours to practice in front of the mirror, working up for this moment. For this test.

“Satisfied?” he asks with a quirk of an eyebrow.

“God, yes,” Charles says. His voice is shaky with the same relief that fills Erik’s chest as he steps forward and rests his forehead against Erik’s shoulder.

A cage, Erik thinks as he sets his arms around Charles and holds him near. A cage of shining, smooth metal to keep him safe from the world—from himself. And they can still… that shining beast might still be born. It might glitter with swords and spears. There might be blood gleaming on its dark, heavy hide.

Erik smiles as his heart settles back down to a predator’s beat. Slow. Steady. Determined.

“Let’s go to bed.”

**Author's Note:**

> 01. |  | 05. |  | 09. |  | 13. |   
> ---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---  
> 02. |  | 06. |  | 10. |  | 14. |   
> 03. |  | 07. |  | 11. |  | 15. |   
> 04. |  | 08. |  | 12. |  | 16. | 


End file.
